Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Jean Renoir | The Diary of a Chambermaid

Burgess
Meredith (screenplay, based on a fiction by Octave Mirbeau and a play by André
Heuzé, André de Lorde and Thielly Nores), Jean Renoir (director) The Diary of a Chambermaid / 1946

I must admit, the first time I saw this film,
one of the great Jean Renoir’s from his Americanperiod films—having already seen Luis
Buñuel’s 1964 version—I was somewhat disappointed. While Buñuel accentuated the
bizarre and dark aspects of Mirbeau’s eerie fiction, Renoir seemed to be trying
the convert the perverse series of events that occur to an ambitious
chambermaid, into a comedy. Indeed the casting of the light-hearted Paulette
Goddard as Célestine, and the overt comedy actors Burgess Meredith (who had
also written the screenplay) and Irene Ryan—both long-time American studio
character actors—appeared to remove this work from any of the horror-like
elements of the original. Renoir’s version, as most critics have agreed, looks
forward to his later works, in which artifice and theatricality definitely
dominated. Moreover, The Diary of a
Chambermaid often has the look and feel of a studio product. The French, in
particular, perceived this Renoir work, despite the master’s reputation, as the
product of an exile who had rejected the very qualities, the perverse, satiric
humor, that the French literary work had made famous.

Seeing it again on Netflix just this morning, however, I begin to see
the logic of Renoir’s direction, which parallels the determined, pre-feminist
young Célestine with the wonderful comic posturings of Louis (Irene Ryan)—who
cannot even walk across the room without the bearing the weight of her sense of
worthlessness—and the hilarious volleys of the mad-man neighbor, Captain Mauger
(Burgess Meredith), who not only hates the Lanlaires, literary throwing rocks
at their glass houses (the gardening sheds), but is proud of his ability to eat
anything and everything. Captain Lainaire’s (Reginald Owen) occasional
rebellions against life at the Lainaire estate, moreover, adds to the fun. They
are perfect foils for the young Célistine’s innocent, yet ambitious attempts to
move up the social ladder while simultaneously remaining in her position as a seasoned chambermaid.

Throughout much of the film, the villain
appears to be Madame Lanlaire (the terrifying Judith Anderson, a few years
after her own frightening portrayal of a serving woman in Hitchcock’s Rebecca.) For much of Renoir’s film, the
light-hearted, flirtatious chambermaid brilliantly plays out her mobile
aspirations against these exaggerated types.

The other figure of her world, the valet Joseph (Francis Lederer),
hovers in the background. To Louise and others Célestine jokes that he is an
“undertaker,” but his slavish obedience to Madame Lanlaire, and his refusal to
reveal himself, seems to render him basically ineffectual. If, like Célestine,
we blanch a bit when his method of killing geese is described—he pokes them in the
neck with a long needle to prevent their loss of blood—he remains, nonetheless,
a valet, something both Célistine and Madame Lanlaire insist is permanent in
his personality.

The return home, however, of the long-absent son, Georges, changes
everything, as suddenly the monstrous Madame attempts to warm up to her
chambermaid, having purchased expensive Paris gowns for her, demanding that she
change her hair to fit current Paris fashions. Célestine remodels herself in
Madame’s image with both delight and a great deal of hesitation, not unlike
Madeline’s acceptance of Scottie’s remaking of her image, a few years later, in
Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and at the same
time, the film shifts, gradually transforming itself from a kind of gold-digger
comedy into a story of almost surreal proportions.

Despite all the of the enforced “acting,” Célestine proceeds to fall in
love with Georges, even though his reaction seems inexplicably contradictory,
as one moment he signals desire and responds to her gentle ministrations, and
the next rejects the girl as an agent of his mother’s suffocating love. What
the film reveals, but seldom speaks of, is that Georges is dying of
tuberculosis; accordingly he loses energy in the very moments of great
stimulation and fears, fearing, we later discover, that the young chambermaid
cannot dare kiss him for fear of infection. That Renoir keeps this important
aspect of their relationship covert helps to create a tension that the young,
head over-heels-in-love girl, cannot explain. Does he love her or hate her?
Does he, so manipulated by his overbearing mother, love women at all?

Accordingly, Célestine
is not only confused, but angered, as she is forced, in her aspirations
for a way out and servitude and assurance of wealth, to look to the elderly
neighbor or, in an even more frightening plot development, to accept the
attentions of Joseph, who has secretly bought a bar in Cherbourg, where he
intends to implant his new wife as a draw for soldiers and sailors. Like Célestine,
he is attracted to the Lanlaire vault of silver and other treasures they bring
out only once a year to celebrate against
the French revolution. Joseph sees the chambermaid, in her plottings and
desire for upward mobility, to be of same kind of person he is; and, in some
respects, he is right. Except she knows, in her heart, that he is perceiving
only the worst of her instead of good girl, despite her misconceived
aspirations, she has always attempted to be.

Unlike Buñuel’s version, where the valet is an
ogre whom the chambermaid attempts to reveal to the society at large, Joseph is
a clever manipulator, willing to fulfill her demands of real cash with by any
means available. When he is overheard by Madame Lanlaire in his plots to steal
their secret cache, he determines to find another source, through the robbery
of their feisty neighbor, Captain Mauger, who has money hidden away in his
house.

After having locked up his housekeeper-mother-lover, Rose (Florence
Bates), Mauger has run off to the small neighboring town to meet with Célestine,
where he plots to marry her in Paris. Returning home for his money, he is met
my Joseph and murdered. Renoir’s light-hearted work has suddenly turned sour,
as everything that was light and playful has become a desperate fight to the
death. When Joseph reveals that he has raised the mney, Célestine suddenly perceives,
through the appearance of Rose, the criminal acts Joseph has committed, he, on his
part, insisting that she is equally involved in the crime. The sudden shock of
her unintentional entwinement in the murder tumbles Renoir’s film over a kind
of cinematic cliff where what has been desire and flirtatiousness becomes deep
metaphysical guilt, perhaps turning Renoir’s work, in some sense, into a more
horrifying world than Buñuel’s. What follows takes the movie almost into the
world of the absurd.

A Lanlaire tradition is to have a late-night
drink, in their anti-celebration of the Revolution, with the servants. The
servants, including Célestine and Joseph, are toasted at the very moment when
all emotions have come to the surface, including Georges', when he once again
is made to face off with Célestine. Joseph announces that he is leaving—with Célestine,
to which Georges responds with total disbelief. Can she really love this
monstrous man? Demanding that she kiss Joseph to demonstrate her true love,
Georges reveals, as she springs from the room, that she is not at all in love
with Joseph, and chases after her.

In
one of the most disgusting pieces of human brokering, Joseph bickers with
Madame Lanlaire over their cache of their silverware, plates, tureens, and even
snuff boxes (studded with rubies and diamonds), in return for his promise to
take Célestine away, in order to leave Georges in her arms. At first, we
believe that she will chose the meaningless objects even over son, as she
willingly gives up only a few tureens, a few tokens. He insists upon it all,
she attempting to negotiate a split. He wins. The battle between the two is one
of the most devastating satires of the linked interest of the wealthy and the
aspirant upstarts ever committed to screen. Having won everything he has
sought, Joseph now descends to the potting sheds, to where the real lovers,
Georges and Célestine have recovered themselves.

Murder is clearly in the air, as Joseph beats Georges, Célestine
intervening, again and again. Yet each time Georges, the natural weakling,
rebounds to fight another bout. He loses, and his life is saved only by Célestine’s
acceptance of Joseph’s demand to go along with him. Beating the horse, Joseph
moves toward the station, but is stopped by the celebratory revolutionary
crowds, who are, once again, happy to see Célestine among their midst. Taking
advantage of the situation, the former chambermaid abandons the cart to offer
up all their silver lucre to everyone at the event: she is no longer, clearly,
interested in its financial worth or even its sentimental value. The crowd
pushes forward, further impeding Joseph’s escape. When Georges shows up once
more, a battle ensures, where Joseph attempts to kill, yet again, with his long
needle induced into the necks of geese and Captain Mauger. The crowd finally
captures the villain; we are not sure whether or not he is dead. In a strange
sense, the whole scene has appeared to be related somewhat to the crowd
reactions in the movie Frankenstein,
having finally captured the monstrous beast.

The
final scene restores the film's comic viewpoint, as leaving the territory via
train, Georges tells Célestine how to close her diary—with the wedding vow.
Even if he has somewhat regained his health, however, we know he is doomed,
given the intensity of his illness, to live only a few years. But then, it is
clear, the worthy Célestine will inherit all that Lanlaire wealth.